A forum for creative designers, illustrators and artists

My life has been crazy these past few months. Apart from work, and kids and housework I’m trying to finish an MA in History of Art, but I’m almost there. But the good thing is that I found time to go to a few amazing exhibitions that I wanted to recommend.

When I saw that the Tate was putting on a Marlene Dumas exhibition I wanted to see what it was all about. I was a little bit skeptical about it all but seeing her big paintings there in front of me was not the same thing. The subjects of the paintings are crude, real, most of them depict sex, death, fear, shame. A lot of them refer to modern and current affairs in the news around the world. These rejected individuals, her muses, are mainly vulnerable people who have experienced a hard time in their life – women, children, gay men, African people killed by ethnographers and slavery.

‘Secondhand images’, she has said, ‘can generate first-hand emotions.’ Dumas never paints directly from life. Her subjects are drawn from both public and personal references and include her daughter and herself, as well as recognisable faces such as Amy Winehouse, Naomi Campbell, Princess Diana, and even Osama bin Laden.

Those eyes really haunt you. I left the exhibition with a very strong stomachache, but glad to feel something memorable after seeing her work. At the end of the day, life is not a fairytale, it’s difficult and hard work and life is unjust. That’s how it is. I think Dumas portrays a real vision of our modern world. Pessimistic maybe, but very real.

Her writings and ideas on the wall play an important part in the exhibition – every paragraph of her ideas is key, and show her as a tenacious thinker.

These paintings in particular captured my attention. Dead Girl. There she is, her head lying on the floor, the blood running, it is very graphic, very crude. Another one is 22 gay men, in black and white. Another one is the painting of the man who murdered the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, shooting him repeatedly before slashing his throat. Why is he there as a painting? Or Osama Bin Laden?

The exhibition runs until May 10th at the Tate Modern, don’t miss the opportunity to see it.

Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich is back again with his visual paradox installation.

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Seoul, Korea (MMCA) has a harbour where colourful rowboats appear to be floating.

But at a closer glance, Port of Reflections, Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich turns out to be an optical illusion. The work reveals its secrets from above: the boats are actually suspended in midair, and the moving liquid that they appear to be floating in is the space below, a room with walls covered in black carpet.

Erlich wanted to create “a bizarre experience where the real and the unreal, or the real and the illusory, are exquisitely blended in surreal yet ambient surroundings,” as explained in the museum’s presentation text.Port of Reflections has a similar taste of some of his past exhibitions including mirrored buildings that viewers can virtually climb, fake swimming pools that show people walking below the water’s surface, and a lone facade in the sky.

It will be on display at the Seoul Box at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Seoul, Korea, through September 15, 2015.

Numen/For Use is a collective working in the fields of conceptual art, scenography, industrial and spatial design.

The group’s early enterprises are characterized by experiments with impersonal design and radical formal reduction, deeply rooted in the tradition of high modernism and mainly applied to various synergetic total-design projects in Croatia. From 2004. onwards, after setting up a large scale site-specific project for the production of “Inferno” in the National Centre for Drama in Madrid, Numen/ For Use become intensely involved with scenography. Further realisations in theatres across Europe ensue. Since 2008. the collective turns its focus towards configuring objects and concepts without a predefined function, an activity resulting in the more hybrid and experimental works such as the N-Light series and Tape Installation.

This project one of the N-light series and it is amazing! Three out of six surfaces of the cube are made of flexible membrane (foil mirror) with air tank and a compressor connected to it and the other three mirrors are semi transparent spy-glass. By inflating or deflating the air tank, the membrane turns convex or concave, deforming the reflections. Watch the video!

Ronai David, Damien Mortini and Aurelien Gantier put together Christmas Experiments, a digital advent calendar that reveals a new web-based treat every day throughout December. Each one is the product of a different developer.

My favourite is Finding Home by Michael Anthony, which features a little ball of light that travels into amazing landscapes that change colours and time, going through mountains and space and then into a galaxy, it is pretty awesome!

I want to tell you about an amazing illustrator who is doing an awesome project called Pequeños Grandes Mundos (Little Big Worlds). His name is Ivanke, and he is Argentinian. I came across his work via Facebook because he is a friend of a friend. He is travelling all over Latin American, staying in tiny little villages, helping kids to draw, and running workshops for free. His paying for all these projects himself and has already been to Argentina, Bolivia, Perú, Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico y Cuba.

There is one simple goal: to create art with children from cities all around the world, reaching boys and girls from different communities in every continent.

550 days, 50 countries drawing with kids. He spent 230 in Latin America and the next stop is Asia. You can see a film about this project here with subtitles.

How can you help? Well, you can buy his illustrations that help to subsidise the last bit of his trip in Asia here or in his online shop where you can buy beautiful framed illustrations. Christmas is coming and you will be a supporting a wonderful project!